Sense of Belonging: A Fundamental Key to Understanding the Endurance of Learning

In an attempt to understand what truly accounts for learning endurance, strong relationship between student's prior knowledge and classroom instruction- a sense of belonging- was considered to have a significant impact on the retention of learning. In this study, we set out to investigate the effect of a classroom instruction that incorporates a sense of belonging to explain learning endurance. Thirty-five (35) students in Grade 9 experimental group were taught science competencies integrating a sense of belonging via contextualization of instruction, and we waited over a year to test their endurance of learning. Students completed a validated self-report sense of belonging scale, the responses of which were correlated to their retained knowledge based on delayed posttest scores. After a year of knowledge incubation, we found that students maintained a stronger sense of belonging, which was strongly correlated to their higher levels of retained knowledge. Higher mean values for the experimental group (exp.>comp.) supported the conclusion that these data were significantly different from the comparison group (p<0.05). It turns out, however, that time does not accurately predict how much information will decay or endure. The study underpins the utilization of a sense of belonging instruction as a fundamental key to ensuring learning endurance.